When can Neat Image help?

Neat Image improves image quality by reducing noise, when you have no control over the shooting conditions or the origin of the images.

As an experienced photographer, you know how to minimize noise in your photos. You use a top quality camera. You select moderate, not high ISO settings. You use a tripod so that you can take sharper pictures with longer exposures. You can choose to shoot still or slowly moving subjects.

But these optimal conditions don’t apply to many real life photography situations. Whether you’re a professional paid by the shot, or you’re an experienced amateur who wants exhibition quality images, you’ll always need better quality from less than ideal shooting situations.

That’s where Neat Image comes in. It cleans and enhances images taken from real life.

Action, children, wildlife and high-speed photos

Your photographic subjects that are always on the move demand high shutter speeds, if you wish to capture the subject clearly. So you increase your shutter speed. Generally, increased shutter speeds mean that your ISO setting will need to increase. Hello, image noise.

Neat Image minimizes this common source of image noise and makes these action shots even better with noise free clarity.

Available light (no flash) photography

Sometimes you just can’t use flash. Or you may not even want it. Available light photography sets moods that flash can’t reproduce. And many public spaces such as museums, churches, some public exhibitions, and some zoos all prohibit flash photography. Or you may need to respect nocturnal wildlife by using available light. In all of these situations, you’ll need to boost the ISO speed rating of your camera, and that means image noise. Neat Image will help you create great images anyway.

Compact cameras with small sensors

The majority of photos nowadays are taken with smartphones, tablets, action cameras, and compact cameras (known as point-and-shoots) — all of which have fairly small image sensors. Unlike digital SLRs and high end cameras, these devices very often take images that suffer from noise, even in relatively good conditions. Even shooting indoors or in overcast weather can create noisy images. Moderate ISO rates of 400 or 800 used by a compact camera will result in photos with very noticeable noise. Neat Image will recover such photos and restore image details clouded by noise and unwanted artifacts.

Night shots and time lapse photography

When very long exposure times are used, noise levels in resulting images increase dramatically, even when using low ISO rates. Astro-photography, night landscape, cityscape photography, and time-lapse photography are the types of shots that can be impacted by this noise. The reason for this is that the camera sensor temperature increases during long exposures, which boosts the noise levels in resulting images even when using low ISO rates. Neat Image not only reduces the noise in long time exposure images, but also retains the fine details captured in these detailed shots.

Narrow aperture shots (high F-stops)

Small aperture values provide sharp and deep focus. At the same time, high F-stop settings geometrically limit the amount of light captured. This fact forces the photographer to use longer exposures or higher ISO rates, especially when the scene is not adequately lit. As a result, these photos show more noise at the same time that the photographer wants to emphasize sharpness and depth of field. Neat Image makes these images look clean and sharp.

Using an incorrect shooting mode by mistake

Today’s digital cameras are almost infinitely flexible, with many modes, ranges, and settings. But, that flexibility means that your camera can be left set to a shooting mode or given settings that don’t fit the current conditions. So you may grab your camera for a once-in-a-lifetime shot — and find that the ISO was set ridiculously high for the conditions, or you had unnecessary exposure compensation set. Later, when you adjust the brightness and contrast of such shots after the fact, you’ll see the result — high levels of grain. Neat Image can repair your mistakes by minimizing grain, and give you back the shot that you wish you’d taken.

Compression artifacts, film and photo grain, and other imperfections

Besides removing sensor noise, Neat Image excels at removing other types of unwanted patterns that reduce image quality. JPEG images can suffer from “blocky” noise patterns — these are known as compression artifacts, and are created when JPEG compression of an image is too aggressive. Scanned images — either positive (slide) film or negatives, or printed photos that are scanned — may show obvious grain from the film. And some printed images that are scanned from commercial materials such as brochures can contain patterns created by the offset printing process. Neat Image can reduce and minimize noise from these sources. This is why Neat Image is widely used by professionals in archiving, digitizing and image restoration.